Meta-analysis uncovers public’s skill in detecting fake news, but skepticism towards true news persists

While the internet has made accessing information and updates on what is happening in the world extremely easy, it has also facilitated the proliferation of fake news. Over the past decades, fake news has thus become a heated topic of debate, with some social media platforms introducing measures aimed at curbing online misinformation.

Researchers at PSL University and University of Zurich recently set out to investigate people’s ability to correctly identify both true and false news, by reviewing previous psychology and behavioral science studies. The findings of their meta-analysis, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that most people are good at identifying fake news, while a good portion of people tend to be skeptical of news that is true.

“In May 2021, Jan Pfänder, who led the study, took a course on meta-analysis and wanted to do a meta-analysis on news judgment,” Sacha Altay, senior author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.

“At the time, I found the idea interesting but didn’t see much potential. A year later, in light of academic debates about whether skepticism towards true news is a greater issue than gullibility towards false news, I saw an angle: the data Jan started collecting could not only tell us whether people can tell true from false news, but also whether people are more skeptical of true news than they are gullible of false news.”

When Altay and Pfänder first started conducting their meta-analysis, they observed that many past studies gathered evidence suggesting that people are quite good at distinguishing between true and false news, with the rejection of true news being more common than the acceptance of false news. Nonetheless, many academics were not convinced by these findings and public discourse continued to emphasize people’s misinformation.

“We thus decided to systematically investigate these apparent trends to establish whether they are real or not, and whether they could be caused by some methodological artifacts, such as the type of scales used to measure the accuracy of the news or the news selection process itself,” explained Altay.

“We conducted a systematic literature review and a pre-registered meta-analysis of all the experiments exposing people to true and false news and asking them to rate the accuracy of the news.”

Altay and Pfänder reviewed several past studies, which included a total of 194,438 participants based in 40 different countries across six continents. The findings of their meta-analysis appeared to confirm earlier results, suggesting that people are very good at discerning between true and false news.

“A large majority of people (~80%) can discern true from false news,” said Altay. “The implication is that crowdsourced fact-checking initiatives have a lot of potential: we should find ways to harness collective intelligence when it comes to rating the quality of information online.”

While their findings suggest that most people can accurately judge the veracity of news, they also showed that people are slightly better at spotting false news than true news. In other words, most of the people who took part in the studies appeared to be better skilled at rating false news as false than rating true news as true.

“A small majority of people show this trend (59%),” said Altay. “The implication of this finding is that we should focus more on increasing the acceptance of true news. Currently, a lot of efforts are dedicated to making people skeptical of (false) news, however, our data shows that there may be more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of false news.”

The recent meta-analysis run by Altay and Pfänder aligns with previous findings, thus suggesting that people are better at identifying false news than public opinion might think. The researchers are now planning to carry out further studies to assess the potential of various strategies for improving people’s ability to tell false and true news apart.

“As part of our future research, we will do another meta-analysis, this time focusing on interventions aimed at improving people’s ability to discern true from false news,” added Altay. “The goal is to measure how effective they are and under what conditions.”

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